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7 Ways to Create Room in Your Life for Meaningful Work (as a millennial mom)

For us as moms deep work can be incredibly elusive, but I’m committed to finding a way to carve out time for meaningful, creative activities. I finally finished reading Deep Work, by Cal Newport, and while his paradigm is that of a male professor and he talks in terms of being an office knowledge worker, I found quite a few useful gems we can apply to this pursuit as women.

In the first few chapters he defends the necessity and value of deep work. I had already accepted his premise but found his evidence both interesting and compelling.

His first big point is that deep work is valuable but not commonly valued or prioritized today, and that this provides us with an opportunity. I think this is even more true as moms. We all have similar struggles and questions, but most of us will not create the time needed to do deep creative work generating and sharing the solutions.

Here are my 5 biggest takeaways from the book, which I found greatly helpful and encouraging, and I hope will assist you too in finding room for deep and meaningful work, and resisting the lie that for us this practice is somehow intrinsically out of reach.

1. See How Craftsmanship Provides Meaning

In the section where he gives a philosophical argument for depth, he mentions All Things Shining by Dreyfus and Kelly, which is now on my reading list. In it they explore “how notions of sacredness and meaning have evolved throughout the history of human culture.”

He goes on to say that these authors are worried about a diminishment in our current time of sacred, shining things. Ever since Descartes we have moved away from the idea of “a God or king bestowing truth” and given that role to the individual.

He goes on, “For all its good in the political arena, in the domain of the metaphysical this thinking stripped the world of the order and sacredness essential to create meaning. In a post-Enlightenment world we have tasked ourselves to identify what’s meaningful and what’s not, an exercise that can seem arbitrary and induce a creeping nihilism.” ( pg 87)

That is a whole thing it would be good to get into another time, but I think at a basic level we all know and feel exactly what he is talking about, and the point he makes from this is that craftsmanship, and the deep work that accompanies it, has innate value we can feel, even when there is so much we don’t know, or at least that feeling that too many important things are up for debate.

He argues that no matter your job, career, vocation, etc that you can find ways to see it as your craft, and that having the attitude that comes with craftsmanship will bring meaning into your life in a fundamental way.

I love this, I found it intriguing and helpful and I’m trying to figure out how to apply it to motherhood, but I do know that it helps explain why I love writing. Writing is my craft. A well-written piece of work soothes something in me that longs for beauty, for truth, for meaning.

2. Take a ‘Journalistic Approach’ to Scheduling Deep Work

He provides several methods for approaching deep work in relation to integrating it into your schedule. As a mom I found the journalistic one to be intriguing and the only one that’s really practical given the responsibilities of running a household. This basically means rather than withdrawing from society, or taking weekends, or working for a couple hours at the same time everyday, you fit in time regularly as you go. In this scheduling method he says you must be mindful of the energy it takes to switch from shallow to deep mode, as it can sap your willpower, and he says it requires “a sense of confidence in your abilities – a conviction that what you’re doing is important and will succeed.”

I find it deeply gratifying to know that I can assume the same schedule as he does as a professor, because he too has obstacles to working at the same time every day, in a consistent daily routine. But he basically warns that this is not for the novice or the faint of heart. I’ll need to manage my energy, and sense of necessity, that through my writing I’m doing important work that needs to routinely finished and published, to contribute value to the world.

3. Our Daily Capacity for Deep Work is 4 Hours

He talks at length about how to remove some of the shallow activity from your schedule to make room for deep work, but he says our capacity for deep work is really only 4 hours a day. We’re only trying to make room for 4 hours of focused, intense work that will move the needle on important projects.

I found this incredibly encouraging and reassuring. I know from logging my time in the past that when you are mindful you can often find an hour or two, and careful planning can typically create an hr or two more, for something that’s really important to you.

I may have kids and a house to clean, but also don’t have staff meetings or a boss. I completely set my own schedule. If I find room for close to 4 hours of deep work most weekdays I’ll have created the time resources that he proscribes. I’m certainly not there yet, but I’m struck by the idea that this is totally doable for me, if I choose to be disciplined and motivated.

4. Mental Rest = Subconscious Productivity

As a mom I found this one incredibly encouraging, and validating. It’s something I’ve sort of started doing naturally as a result of practicing gratitude and working on being present with my kids.

He says the research shows that when you fully unplug mentally from work in between deep work sessions, your subconscious does valuable work. It productively works through ideas and issues for you, at a different level and in a different way than when you consciously tackle a problem.

As I move forward and get better at my current method of time blocking, I am going to embrace the truth that when I research and ideate for an hour, stop to take my kids to the park, make lunch, and then come back to a solid afternoon writing session, if I fully rest my mind and relax and enjoy playing with my kids, this is both healthy for my psyche and productive for the project at hand.

Our brains are so incredible, they are always active on some level. When we try to consciously work through a problem when we are either mentally fatigued or in an non-conducive environment full of interruptions, we are embracing the lie that only our conscious mind can solve it and neglecting to enlist the aid of our subconscious mind in working on it while we tend to other important but often less noble-feeling activities.

5. Try Productive Meditation

As he talks about being purposeful about leisure and off time, he talks both about resting your mind, and also looking for opportunities for deep thought work, to practice something he calls productive meditation. Similar but different to mindful meditation, this is when you are doing a physical activity and you use the time to mentally work over a particular issue in your mind. What matters here is staying focused on that specific question, and bringing your mind back to it if it starts to wander or loop unproductively.

I’ve already found myself doing this some times, but now I feel I have terminology and a framework for this. I can think about how and when to strategically fit this in, and consider it deep thought time, always being mindful to pay attention to when I can tell I need a mental rest instead.

I now feel equipped with two good uses for all that extra time watching kids and feeling unoccupied but ‘on call’. One is to truly rest my mind and enjoy my children. The other, which is great for exercising or doing housework is productive meditation, where a physical activity is devoted to a specific, strategic mental exercise. For me this will most often be either working out the outline and flow of a post, or thinking more broadly about ideas in my recent reading and how they interact with other ideas to help form a new paradigm for how we think about life.

6. Embrace Being Active and Feeling Alive All Day

This is a good one. I really like where he talks about how we don’t understand human nature, when we resist structuring our leisure time. Humans actually love to feel alive and be active 18 hours a day. He quotes another author who says what energizes the human spirit is change, not rest. Giving your mind meaningful things throughout the day makes you more fulfilled. The mind fatigues from prolonged attention to one thing or in one mode.

Of course this is huge for moms. I’ve really been struggling and wrestling with the question of whether I should embrace just being on my feet all day, and focus on finding a few short breaks to recharge, instead of complaining or wishing for a life with more so called rest or down time.

So this belief that humans are meant to be active all day and that we simply need to be intentional in our choosing and then vary our activities really resonates with me and increases my hope that I’ll find a way forward that allows me to incorporate all of my highest values, without having to compromise something truly important to me.

7. Assess Your Attention to Social Media

He has a follow up book called Digital Minimalism, that I want to read which is devoted to this topic. But his advice on it in Deep Work is pretty straightforward. With social media, he talks about identifying your highest priority activities that move you toward your few biggest personal and professional goals, and then look at how social media adds or takes away from that.

I’m undecided on this, I think for many of us who spend a lot of time at home social media provides a value connection to friends and community. And for those of us who work for ourselves social media provides a value way to generate business and communicate with both clients and prospects.

My current approach is going to be to focus on the other strategies, and continue to streamline my life and business that allows room for deep, meaningful work, and then once I’ve consistently done that, look at how social media is a useful tool for distribution and discussion of what will hopefully be deeply meaningful ideas and insights that arise from this endeavor, new or re-worked ideas that really help us in our lives in some way, because that’s the whole point.

The Key to Expanding to Your Full Potential

Books, Business, Self Care

An Introduction to your Upper Limit and your Zone of Genius

A partial summary of The Big Leap, by Gay Hendricks

How do you celebrate a big win, or a perfect moment? What do you do when you are in one of those precious mountaintop experiences? What we tend to do in the moment is to sabotage it. We get the high, and then we immediately do something to lessen the experience or the joy we get from it.

For some reason a memory that sticks in my mind is a rare opportunity a couple of years ago when my oldest son and I went to a baseball game together, just the two of us. We got some hot dogs, were enjoying the game, the weather was perfect, the stands weren’t crowded. The moment was perfect. And then we decided to get ice cream, because it was an opportunity to get dippin dots. A few minutes after eating them we both didn’t feel good and my son was so distracted by his stomach feeling unhappy that we left, really early. In the middle of the perfect weather and the non-crowded stands and the rare occasion for just he and I to hang out, just be together in such a perfect setting. But I knew enough to tell the spell was broken, he was unhappy, we might as well go home.

I could tell you other stories from my life. Once I understood the Upper Limit, I started to recognize my behavior of self-sabotaging myself in those moments of perfect happiness. Since I’ve learned about my Upper Limit, I’ve become much happier more consistently, because I learned about an obstacle to my happiness, and how to recognize and overcome it. Most importantly, I have a radar in my head that watches for those moments where I’m really happy, and reminds me to savor the moment, and to really question anything I seek to add to it.

What is the Upper Limit? It’s the main premise in a book called The Big Leap, by Gay Hendricks. From years of research and experience of his own and with his clients, he concludes that we each have a kind of ‘set point’ for our happiness and that we are not used to being happier than that level, so much so that when we raise our happiness to that level, we will do something to sabotage ourselves and bring ourselves back down to a level where we are comfortable. This is mostly subconscious, but you can learn to recognize it.

This affect often shows up when you are starting to have success in multiple areas of your life. Unless you dismantle your Upper Limit, when you have financial success, you will sabotage yourself in the area of relationships, or vice versa. It also shows up in small everyday events. A good example is when you’ve prepared for a party or a dinner and everyone is hanging out, and then you have the urge to go get one more thing, or run to the store for something. Is it really necessary, or are you just avoiding sitting still and receiving the good that wants to come into your life?

Your Upper Limit will keep you from living in your Zone of Genius which is his other big supporting concept in the book. You’ve probably heard this phrase used recently, it’s gaining traction because it’s a fun, powerful idea that evokes an emotional reaction. But people often talk about genius similar to passion, as if you just need to find it.

But your Zone of Genius is something you need to fight for. Hendricks identifies four zones; he says we each have a zone of incompetence, of competence, of excellence, and of genius, and that the temptation is to stay in our Zone of Excellence because that is where we are successful, and predictable; people can count on us. But he says if we don’t make the leap to the Zone of Genius, something precious inside of us will die.

The key to making the leap is removing your Upper Limit. This is done in two basic ways. The first is to identify your key limiting beliefs. He identifies four primary ones and calls them hidden barriers. The second is an ongoing process of reconditioning yourself and changing your thinking; he provides a great list of practical strategies for doing this.

So what are the limiting beliefs, the 4 hidden barriers he identifies? These are reasons that we believe we cannot expand to our full potential. They are: feeling fundamentally flawed, avoiding disloyalty and abandonment, believing that more success brings a bigger burden, and a concern around outshining others.

Here are the sentences he gives that represent the unconscious beliefs. He says everyone has at least one, some people have a few. For myself and everyone I’ve talked to, at least one of these jumps off the page at you.

I cannot expand to my full creative genius because something is fundamentally wrong with me. (ie. I’m not worthy of it)

I cannot expand to my full success because it would cause me to end up all alone, be disloyal to my roots, and leave behind people in my past.

I can’t expand to my highest potential because I’d be an even bigger burden than I am now.

I must not expand to my full success, because if I did I would outshine others and make them look or feel bad.

Having laid the groundwork, he calls it the ‘root structure’ of the Upper Limit, he says, “Your Upper Limit Problem lives in the moment-by-moment interactions you have with yourself and the people around you. There is only one way to get this data, and that is to focus your keen awareness on specific aspects of your daily life.” (pg 61)

For the ongoing process – he calls it a ‘lifelong pursuit’ – of removing your upper limit, he provides a list of common behaviors to watch for: worry, criticism and blame, deflecting, squabbling, getting sick or hurt, hiding significant feelings, not keeping agreements not speaking significant truths to the relevant people.

His approach here is to look at each of these behaviors when they occur, to ask yourself what they are really about, and challenge yourself to embrace and receive abundance, success and love in your life, and reject these behaviors when they come up, along with the mental thoughts that created them.

Your goal through this ongoing activity is to expand your capacity for abundance, love and success.

After establishing all of this, he goes on in the second half of the book to talk about how to find and live in your zone of genius.

For more on how to dismantle the four hidden barriers read my next post on this, How to Dismantle Your Upper Limit: 3 Truths for Removing Limiting Beliefs

A lesson from quantum physics

Books

So in the midst of re-reading The Power of Intention, by Wayne Dyer, with my book club, I remembered his reference to The Field, and started reading it a week ago. What Lynne McTaggart does in this book is provide a great introduction and summary of the new discoveries in science around quantum physics, and explore how they inform the way that we view ourselves and our world.

She calls this new science a “science of the miraculous”. Basically what scientists have discovered is that “at our most elemental, we are not a chemical reaction, but an energetic charge.”

Current science is based on ideas from the 17th century, and a world view of separateness, where we sit outside the universe and “our bodies were somehow separate and other from the real us”. It was a ‘machine’ based view of the world.

And Darwin’s discoveries contributed to this view of life as “random, predatory, purposeless and solitary.”

The effects of this on us at a spiritual and metaphysical level have been damaging, and incorrect. Science thus far has provided a view of the world as “mechanized and separate”.

And I so identified with this, she says “Many of us seek refuge from what we see as the harsh and nihilistic fact of our existence in religion, which may offer some succour in its ideals of unity, community and purpose, but through a view of the world that contradicts the view espoused by science. Anyone seeking a spiritual life has had to wrestle with these opposing world views and fruitlessly try to reconcile the two.”

Yes, this has been my quest. And she shows how quantum physics has solved this problem and “laid waste” the world as separate, but it has taken a long time to see the research be accepted, and used beyond the purposes of new technology to be applied philosophically.

I cannot at the moment attempt to summarize the science, but basically it means that everything is made up of one field of energy, and that our observation is “utterly central” to the existence of everything, and that everything is connected to everything else in a sort of invisible web.

Our minds are a powerful, integral part of the world, not separate or somehow ‘from another world’.

There is basically “a life force flowing through the universe – what has variously been called collective consciousness or, as theologians have termed in, the Holy Spirit.”

Unlike the previous paradigm, she says this one is ‘life-enhancing’. These were “ideas that could empower us, with their implications of order and control. We were not simply accidents of nature. There was purpose and unity to our world and our place within it, and we had an important say in it.” And humans were no longer separate from each other, or on the outside looking in on the world.

She goes on to cover in depth, but in an accessible way, the journey of scientists and their discoveries.

The main point for the moment is that there is scientific basis for the way Wayne Dyer views the world, and that we can and should take a positive, creative stance toward the world. We have the ability to align ourselves with the divine force underlying the universe, and co-create our world, both creating the life we want and discovering who were meant to be, in that beautiful paradoxical way that he talks about.

Ego is the Enemy

Books

I have a great fear of my own pride. Or I should say I did until very recently. If you’re in any way an artist or a ‘creative’, you know what I’m talking about. It’s that feeling that you know deep down that you were meant to produce something amazing, something inspired. But you wrestle with the prospect of creating something wonderful, of being worthy of such a task.

Can you? Should you? Why not? Yet something holds us back.

We often refer to this as a fear of success. Ever since I set out to start my own business and make money on my own terms, I’ve been seeking the solution to this fear, this deep unsettling question. In a few broad strokes here, I want to share some pieces that came together to unlock this for me.

One of the earliest pieces was the core thesis of Gay Hendricks’ book, The Big Leap. He proposes that we each have a natural upper limit to our happiness. It is a kind of set point, a ceiling to our ability to be happy and successful. Until we dismantle it he says we will sabotage ourselves in some way every time we get close to it. Once I heard his theory, I was convinced not only by his many stories, but by all the evidence I saw of this in my own life and the stories of others.

He identifies four main forms that the upper limit takes, four main categories of limiting beliefs. And while he does give a great list of strategies for recognizing when you are ‘upper limiting’ yourself, and reducing its effect, I finished the book greatly impressed but still seeking answers as to how to truly remove the ‘hidden barriers’ as he calls these core limiting beliefs.

One was the belief of being fundamentally unworthy of incredible happiness and success. Another was a concern around outshining others. They all add up to the belief that somehow ‘I’ must not enjoy true success or ‘expand to my full potential’ or something bad will happen. And that belief becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

How do we truly dismantle these beliefs and find the freedom to realize our potential and pursue abundance unapologetically?

My next clue was found in the form of a book by one of my newest favorite authors, Ryan Holiday. In Ego is the Enemy he explores in depth the role of the ego and our relationship with it. There is so much to say about this, I won’t get into it at the moment but suffice it to say that ego is a very real part of your brain that you must learn to observe, understand, and manage from an outside perspective, in order to find both long term success and just in general, inner peace.

It was comforting to find that I am not my ego, and although I lived a large portion of my life being dominated by the ego, I don’t have to continue on that path any longer.

A contributing idea to which we will also return later is the concept of ‘resistance’ as Steven Pressfield lays it out in his series of non-fiction books, The War of Art, Turning Pro, Do the Work, and The Artist’s Journey. If you consider yourself a creative or an artist, or any any kind of soul journey, these are required reading. They are relatively short, and equal parts impactful and entertaining. For their target audience I would dare say they are positively captivating. I have read the greater part of them multiple times.

In short, you must accept and anticipate that the creative journey causes resistance to show up to oppose it. And what I see in his description of this struggle is the wrestling we do to turn away from the way of the ego and embrace instead the call of our soul, of our true self, to embrace our true voice, to do the real work we were put here to do.

The final piece came in the chapter of Wayne Dyer’s book, The Power of Intention, where he talks about self respect coming from viewing yourself as a divine creation, as a ‘piece of God’.

The working of the ego ultimately causes self-rejection. We must choose a better path. I like how Dyer puts it:

“Know that the universe is filled with abundance and prosperity and is available to everyone, and you come down on the side of having that abundance show up for you as well. Your level of self-regard must come from your knowing within yourself that you have a sacred connection. Let nothing shake that divine foundation….self respect is your personal choice. It has nothing to do with what others may think of you. Your self-respect comes from the self and the self alone.”
– Wayner Dyer, The Power of Intention, pg 139

The ego is preoccupied with the opinions of others. But we must reject that path and find our identity in a firmer foundation than our accomplishments or reputation.

I learned from Jen Sincero that I could take back ownership of my goals, my desires, and my dreams. I learned from Grant Cardone that I should go further, reject the victim mentality, and take ownership of everything in my life, regardless of the apparent source, and assume the attitude of full control over my circumstances.

Then I learned from Wayne Dyer, and a host of others, but he finally got through to me, that I can take control of my own view, opinion of, and attitude toward, myself. And that my regard for myself does not have to ebb and flow based on my most recent failure or success, but instead is rooted unwaveringly in my identity as a divine creation, intended to be here for a beautiful purpose.

Next time I’ll dive deeper into the concept of the ego, to explain how exposing its nature, and finding a right relationship with ourselves frees us from a fear of success.